PHILIPSBURG - Sydney Rae Cutler came tripping down the hall from fourth grade Wednesday morning, very much a chip off the old Granite County block.

"Very athletic, very competitive, and that's a good thing," her grandmother, Davee Letford, said the day before. "She's her father's daughter, no doubt about it. They look alike and they act alike."

Sadly, the resemblances run deeper.

Mike Cutler, 39 - a man who in 1987 scored 10 touchdowns for the Philipsburg Prospectors in a football game at cross-county rival Drummond - was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia in May 2003. His life was saved that October by a stem cell transplant in Seattle from his sister, Kara Underwood.

Sydney is 9, a fourth-grader here at her father's alma mater, where he's now in his eighth year as superintendent. Last May, Sydney landed in the emergency room in Butte while suffering the worst of a series of headaches. A CT scan by her pediatrician in Anaconda revealed a tumor in the back of her brain.

She was whisked to Seattle Children's Hospital where the cancerous mass was removed, by most indications before any cells had reached her spinal column.

After a summer of radiation treatments, Sydney recently started a series of six to eight chemo cycles that require, among other things, overnight trips back to Seattle once every six weeks through next spring.

Meanwhile, her hair has started growing back. She wears a bandana or a ball cap that reads "Tough Enough to Wear Pink" to school. She ate what her mom, Jody, called a full meat-and-potato meal last weekend for the first time since early May.

And her parents cling to one of the best moments in those agonizing days of May after surgery, in a top-floor room in the Seattle hospital. Sydney wore a patch over one eye, and she had to learn to walk again. She struggled, but she got out of bed and got dressed.

"Mom, I'm working hard," Sydney told Jody. "I'm going to keep working hard, and I'm never going to quit."

Jason Vietor is calling it a "first annual" benefit team roping. That means he plans on making Saturday's event at the Angel's Nest Ranch southwest of Philipsburg a regular affair.

"That was his intention from the very beginning, that this would be a tribute, an annual thing," Jody Cutler said.

Vietor is Jody Cutler's brother, Sydney's uncle, and this cancer thing is getting old. As a high school senior in 1997, he was diagnosed with bone cancer. Only a pioneering grafting procedure at St. Jude's Children's Research Center in Memphis, Tenn., averted amputation.

Vietor organized a golf tournament in Anaconda in the days before Mike Cutler went to Seattle for his stem cell transplant in 2003. On the same day, Philipsburg threw a benefit auction and dinner outside the Sunshine Station to help defray Mike's medical expenses.

In a town of fewer than 900, some 600 dinners were served and nearly $40,000 was raised that day.

"It's not just Philipsburg," said Letford, Mike Cutler's mother. "I would say it's more like Granite County. But you know, it goes farther than that even. There are connections in Anaconda, in Butte, in Missoula - everywhere those kids have been, people care about them."

One of Jody's close friends, Nancy Ward, is also organizing a fundraiser Saturday. Starting at 9 a.m., she'll have a mountain bike race, a combined bike and run race and a five-mile run in succession on her family's Marshall Creek Ranch. In a nod to Sydney's character, it's called the "Are You Tuff Enough Sydney Rae Cutler Fun Event."

"We're kind of all like family," Ward said of the Cutlers. "I grew up going back and forth to the Vietors, and we'd help each other out all the time, haying, calving, moving cows, on shipping days."

Mike's stem-cell transplant was performed the same fall the Drummond Trojans began their run of three straight Class C football champions down the valley. The Trojans marked Cutler's battle by having a team picture taken in front of a banner that read: "Get well, Mike."

Folks in Granite County will attest: If the Drummond-Philipsburg rivalry isn't quite at the Grizzly-Bobcat level, it's not far away.

"How many rival schools would do what they did?" Cutler asked Wednesday. "I hope I never have to give them the support that they've given us. But if that ever arose, my family would be first in line to do whatever we could to help whoever we needed to down in that valley."

By Wednesday, Vietor had 100 teams signed up for the team roping and said he wouldn't be surprised if that was up to 150 by Saturday morning. By the time the second annual roping rolls around, the Cutlers should have a handle on their medical expenses.

But they plan to start a foundation to help other Montana families who are unexpectedly saddled with the same kind of bills.

"There are so many families that deal with this every day, and obviously there are some that don't have a community like we have," Vietor said. "We want to do something that will help a Montana family or a couple of Montana families who are in the same situation."

They'll call the foundation "Head, Heel and Hope," Jody Cutler said.

"It's going to be a Montana thing for Montana kids. We haven't created the board, we haven't filed for (nonprofit) status, but it's going to happen," said Cutler.

And he wants to reach out further than just the immediate region for contributions.

"I want to go after drug companies and these companies that are making millions and billions of dollars off of my sick child," Cutler said. "I will put as much pressure on them as I possibly can for them to give back."

Though he says he feels great right now, Cutler takes a tremendous amount of medication daily. Certain cells in his new immune system want to attack his organs - something called graft-versus-host disease, or GVHD. Immune suppressors neutralize those killer cells.

"That's what I battle with, and now that we're six years out, it's probably something I'll battle with for the rest of my life," he said. "My situation is what it is. I'm not feeling sorry for myself one bit."

It's much easier being a cancer patient than the parent of a patient, he said.

"If I could go through what I went through again every six years, I would do that to keep Sydney from doing any of what she's doing," he said.

He's angry that his daughter has to endure this.

"Why her? Here's a little girl that's very healthy, very active, who's got a lot to offer this world, and she got a year taken away from her childhood that she might not ever be able to get back," he said. "She's had to struggle and struggle and fight just to keep going every day."

Cutler said he even struggled with feelings of guilt when Sydney was hospitalized in Seattle.

"He was wondering if he passed on some weak gene to her," said Jody. "But the doctors said no. If it was all skin cancer, all lymphoma or all breast cancer, they could call it a cluster. But you're talking Jason's bone cancer, Mike's blood cancer, Sydney's brain cancer.

"They said you guys have just had a bad run of crappy luck."

Sydney was at her desk on the first day of fourth grade a couple of weeks ago, but she missed the rest of that week to begin chemotherapy treatments. She's handled the treatments better than her parents could have hoped, and she was in school full time this week.

Is she happy to be back? she was asked.

"Yeah. It makes me feel better," she said.

School, piano lessons, horseback riding on Indy, simply being home among her friends and animals and a community and county of supporters ... it's all working out now.

"You're going to see a little girl with a smile on her face," said her father and fellow cancer survivor moments before Sydney knocked on his office door. "It's kind of made it easier for us."

Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.